Now you’re waiting on the subway platform and an NYU girl is rocking the most ridiculous walk of shame look you’ve ever seen. A picture is worth 1,000 words.

Finally you’re waiting in line at the MUD truck for coffee and you realize you’re behind Kirsten Dunst and she is necking it with the dude from Rilo Kiley.

According to most cultural mores, it’s unacceptable, even tacky to take out your phone and snap photos of people without their permission. But instead of spending hours wishing you could take awkward photos, you can now enjoy an epic morning of Sneakyshots.

Sneakyshot is an iPhone app for the photos you’ve always wanted to take…and share.

Here’s how it works: Launch the app and pretend to be talking on the phone. A woman’s voice will countdown, 3-2-1 and Sneakyshot will shoot 4 photos. You can choose to retake or select your favorite to share on Facebook and Twitter and upload to the Sneakyshot website for everyone to see.

“The novelty of having old looking photos would’ve worn off quickly with Instagram but what makes it compelling is the sharing part. Our innate human behavior to express and share is making photo apps really successful these days,” says Sneakyshot creator Hugh Dornbush.

Because the app obligates you to share, the Sneakyshot site becomes this anonymous, realtime ledger of interesting photos. When it hits the Sneakyshot server, which is powered by Tumblr, the photo is tagged with a location from the user’s phone, which is then run against a Yahoo API to give a more abstract location – so the photo will be tagged with a neighborhood, “West Village” for example, as opposed to GPS coordinates.

According to Dornbush none of the other camera apps play the shutter sound through the inner earpiece and disable the flash, making Sneakyshot really sneaky even if your phone is not on silent.

The app’s design is A+ and we expect its userbase to skew heavily urban, catching on well in cities rife with oddities and celebrity sightings. (OMG IC Josh Harnett!)

Courtney Boyd Myers is the founder of audience.io, a transatlantic company designed to help New York and London based technology startups grow internationally.
Previously, she was the Features Editor and East Coast Editor of TNW covering New York City startups and digital innovation. She loves magnets + reading on a Kindle.
You can follow her on Facebook, Twitter @CBM and Google +.